Web3 for Bootstrapping Businesses, with Ian Landsman

[Music] hey and welcome to things worth learning i'm your host matt stauffer and this is a show where a curious computer programmer that's me interviews fascinating people about their passions and today my guest is ian landsman the founder of founder of userscape which has created an incredible number of things including helping kickstart laravel off to the wild success it says today but one of those things the main thing they've created is called help spot which is a help desk software that has been alive for now 17 years which i know is actually older than some of my listeners so ian has been around the block he's an original kind of like software creator a lot of people call him the godfather of laravel if you know about laravel you probably heard about it a little bit in this podcast so ian can you say hi to the audience and tell them just a little bit about yourself or it's your personal or your professional life yeah hey uh great to be on um thanks for being here you covered a lot there but definitely kind of kick off of everything for me was uh founding help spot you know 17 years ago basically and um yeah three kids so i think we have some connections on that front as well on the kid front and uh beautiful wife and so yeah that's kind of it i'm kind of just uh living the dream there i get the house the kids the wife the business love it um i love it sort of what i've been doing for a while now and before this i never had a job for more than like two and a half years that's why 17 years working on basically the same thing so it's been a trip i uh i i'm since we've never talked about it i'm assuming you don't have adhd but i also always think of you as very much like this like just creator you've always got new ideas type and it's funny because i read these books about people with adhd and a lot of them say like we couldn't keep a job somewhere else so we created a space in which we could be successful i know that dan and me my business partner like we both are like yeah my other jobs haven't been so great and now i've made this thing and i love it and it's i hope i stay here forever so yeah no i i'm not officially diagnosed with anything but i mean i do think uh there's an element to that i'm definitely like creating a place where i can go off and you know like obviously if you have a job where you're this is your task that you have to do and you're responsible for this then i mean some people love that right a lot of people and that's the majority of people but i think for me that would be hard to keep uh interested so yeah just like check out once in a while and you know this is also a huge area where i know you have the same thing with just a great team of like people where like sometimes when i get distracted and i wander off like they're there to like actually do great work to keep us in business which is great and uh so you know uh every once in a while when that happens like i i have that freedom to do that and then i'll be able to come back and be reinvigorated um which is actually a lot of what we're doing now with hubspot is like i've you know been poking around other things for a while i'm not going to come back and we've got a whole bunch of stuff going on with hubspot so it's just really nice to be able to like i don't usually leave leave but to kind of like be distracted and then come back yeah really powerful i think i don't know if i've ever named it that way but that is one of the big pieces of it is that when i get really excited about something i can kind of like like bend away from my primary responses a little a little bit and so usually the things that i'm distracted by are things that help the company in the end anyway like right nine times sometimes i'll make a bet that it doesn't but like most of the time it does and then there's seasons where i'm like no i'm going to live here for a little bit because it needs me or because this is my like you said i'm reinvigorated so i love that really angle of thinking about it so yeah and sometimes you just have to delay i know i found i've found that delay is super powerful and just like like we're doing this whole big change with help spot and like this is something i've been trying to do for years um and i've kept putting it off like and like it's just kind of like now it's the right time and it's like just all fitting in place super perfectly where when we've tried before it wasn't quite ready uh and yeah like just the delay of that i feel like has been useful and i've seen that happen a few times it's like subconsciously or something you know you need to like wait and then yeah and then when you're ready for it it's time right i love that well obviously we can do a podcast about that but let's never do it today it's funny because when ian and i were talking like which topic are we gonna do today just like so many of my guests it's like well we can do this this this that or the other so but today we have picked one but before we get there you know my first question is do you have any sort of life mantra or phrase or idea that you live your life by yeah so i i don't have a s uh like one specific one um but i do have this thing where i tend to pull them as i need them from my favorite movies and i'm like i'm super into movies and people who know me know i'm very much just like obsessed with movies and so uh like the godfather is obviously a big one i'm always pulling through things out of the game the first one i wall street is a big one i pull things out of so i have these handful of movies that um whenever i have a life item that like huh what i think about this like they'll just be something that pops from the godfather right into my head and i'll be like i love that i'll just go with that so that that's kind of my my way of handling that sort of so i'm going to ask you a question and you can you can tell me this is not it's not something you want to do but i know that there's a list of movies that when somebody joins userscape you want them to have watched that list you know in their own free time or whatever it's like is that a list that has ever been made public uh i don't know i don't think i've actually published it i should do that it is an interesting list i mean a lot of it okay um yeah no it hasn't maybe we'll do that for the show should we do that i mean if it ever goes public we'll put it in the show notes yeah go take a look so yeah because i know that like for me i'm slowly making a list of that of like the recommendations from my friends and the more someone's obsessed with movies the more i want to know their top movies you know so i actually had a list of movies that i required my wife to be to have watched before we got married i was like i can't marry somebody that's amazing so do you remember any of i mean i assume godfather's on there but like uh she'd already seen the godfather but there was one like i'm sure wall street was on there um the great escape which is a movie from the 60s that's like one of my favorite scenes okay really awesome movie if you haven't seen the great escape everybody can watch great escape uh so uh like some silly ones like the blues brothers and strings yeah brew which were kind of from my childhood so yeah things like that that's awesome well i put the great escape those other ones i love all them about a great escape have not seen so it's on my best oh it's great queen really good oh okay cool wait i've seen clips from it but i've never actually seen the real thing so yeah cool yeah um uh so we're also not talking about kids today but one of the things i just came to my mind because you i love i love the way that you approach kind of parenting and it involves a lot of like joy i think and so one of the things i thought of that maybe you even taught me i'm not sure is i'm making a list of all the movies i'm eventually have my kids see but i keep one i'm like oh you're not old enough for this you're not over this so i just like why do i not just write them down so i'm now creating a list of like how old do you have to be before you see this movie and but you're gonna see it at some point so i can feel like at some point i've like given them those kind of parenting experiences i need via movies so yeah i definitely have that list um i've been going through that uh it is interesting the age is tricky i'll be interested maybe you can update me over the coming years but um there's eight i think the kids are different so like you did so like the one the when the ones ready the other one might not be ready and then like the younger ones have tend to just catch stuff that the older ones watching anyway so i think they get more ready uh earlier so yeah there is an amazing dynamic there my younger one seems to be ready for most like age appropriateness things earlier than my older one and so it's like oh like what maybe because they're four years apart so like maybe like halfway in between them is like kind of when i think it's like because like she can be a little bit younger and he so i'm like yeah like right you know maybe he has to be ten but she only has to be eight when they see it so like i'm gonna find the space so anyway yeah um okay but you know this podcast is actually about something other than what we've been catching up on which is one particular topic we're gonna talk about today so you don't have to give me a whole pitch on it but just tell me kind of like high level what are we talking about and then i'll you know get started asking you some questions what's our topic today all right our topic is um sort of web three for bootstrapping a business founding a business that all right type of thing that overlap so yeah we got a lot of things we got to set the groundwork for before we even get in the topic because a lot of my listeners don't know what either of those phrases are right let's start with bootstrapping because i think it's a lot simpler what's the simplest definition of bootstrapping a business so the kind of traditional one which my take on this will be a little bit off of traditional but the traditional one is where you self-fund a business of any sort so you you know have your own savings or you might you know like in my case like we sold one of our cars and in addition to savings and you know maximum credit cards out and that kind of thing but we didn't like go raise money from a venture capitalist or um or anything like that you might raise some money from friends and family that sort of gets into this middle ground of is it fully bootstrapped right but um yeah but yeah so you're not really going out to like outside investors it's generally the idea you're kind of making it work on your own with a limited budget and building up a profitable business as soon as you can since you don't necessarily have millions of dollars to just wait yeah five years for the business to become profitable you're focused on profitability much sooner yeah and for those who don't know bootstrap tends to be not always but it tends to be something people describe more when they're talking about a product business versus like a service business so my company is a service business so on day one we were making revenue because on day one we were providing a service to people so bootstrapping and venture capital doesn't really apply as much to service businesses it's more like hey we need to take a year to build a product before we actually start making money and when we start making money we might have two customers right so the the lead time between coming up with the idea and actually making enough money to the idea to match up with the the work you're putting in is much much much longer with a product business than is with service business which is why you have to ask these questions of where's that money to support you during those first one to five years kind of coming from right exactly okay so uh you said you have a little bit of a different definition is it worth going into or is it is that the nitpicking nuance thing all right come on all right so web3 tell me about web3 what does that mean for the the uninitiated okay so web three i'm sure everybody has their own takes on this for people who are aware of web three but basically it's the idea of uh cryptocurrency and blockchain technology and how that might be used in i mean in lots of ways but in what we're gonna talk about here is in uh you know businesses and software and how you might leverage those technologies in uh in new ways but the idea of web three is cryptocurrency and blockchain and the things happening around that on the internet yeah and i don't want to go too far into this but one tiny last bit of definition when we talk about cryptocurrency most fee most people are just aware of it as alternative money right bitcoin uh you know some folks have heard of ethereum but mainly it's usually just kind of bitcoin is a thing that you can transfer you know a fiat currency or just basically like american dollars or credit dollars whatever and you transfer it into bitcoin and then now you're just holding bitcoin and most people think of that as like a thing you do so that you can hope that the bitcoin increases in value after you buy it and then you become rich like that's the main thing and so when they hear blockchain they've either never heard of it or it's just the thing that powers bitcoin so the idea of these things powering software i think is a really unfamiliar thing and again i know we'll probably get in this a bit but is there any like kind of real quick intro of what how does this have to do with software versus finances right so uh this is the part that interests me i'm not really interested in the finances at all i haven't owned much cryptocurrency as speculation um or anything like that so the blockchain is basically the underlying technology it's essentially a database um that is the ledger where transactions are stored um and so initially it was really just about the transactions in terms of the cryptocurrency as currency where do you log those transactions so you know who owns what and it tracks the ownership of digital assets and now it's kind of expanded to be like other kinds of digital assets as well it could be tracked in this distributed database that's not owned by one company it's not run by one country it's uh global and no one no one owns it yeah and that's really helpful and if you think of ledger most of y'all if you've heard the phrase ledger you think of like a bank ledger so like imagine a bank starts with a thousand dollars and the first entry is added a thousand dollars and then they sign up a customer and that customer puts in another two hundred dollars so now there's a ledger that says customer two you know customer one put 200 in so ledger is literally like everything that has ever happened in the history of this bank is there line by line by line by line so we can see the history of customer one's account customer two's account also the entire bank's finances but that bank doesn't make that ledger available to anybody but themselves right and it's only being used for finances so as as ian is describing blockchain it's sort of like you have one of those except everybody in the world can use it see it write to it and say the entire history of any individual dollar or cent or thing that's not finances because we're talking more about you know bitcoin but it's not just bitcoin it's not just ethereum it's also assets that are not financial also you can track when they were created who created them who transferred and it's all completely public to the entire world and so that's what this kind of distributed idea means is it's not owned by google it's not owned by microsoft or facebook it is somehow built magically in the you know that it's very technical but basically it's built in such a way that the entire internet hosts and has access to it basically right yeah all right so so you have kind of like a little bit of a pitch both about so it's funny if those who don't know i just um i dug a whole bunch into web3 last fall and i you know kind of got really involved and i was like i think there's some really promising technologies here and i got really frustrated and burnt out and i put out a tweet about a week ago they just said i'm done with it i think there was a lot of promising technology and a few wonderful people ian being among them um but here's the kind of the things i don't like about it so it's really interesting timing that literally four or five days after putting out that tweet ian and i are talking um but you know i know that we're not actually super disagreeing on that because that you're really digging into the potential side and you're like yeah i understand the downsides but i want to talk about the potential so where do you want to get started do you want to talk a little bit about bootstrapping or do you want to talk about the potential of web 3 or kind of where where's what's what's our angle here um yeah i mean i think i i wouldn't mind just touching on quickly the downsides um just yeah i don't want to get too deep in that but i do think it's worth acknowledging like all this is very uh new risky you have all types of people coming in there's no rules essentially there's no government bodies that are protecting consumers or anything like that so it's definitely for not for the faint of heart uh a lot of this and so um i think you know to me the downside uh i guess my view on the downside is that it's actually not that much different than the internet as a whole and that if you look in your spam folder there's tons of scams in there um it's just that we've built up more architecture around protecting the average person from those internet scams and that um you know because the internet makes it super cheap to run scams like that is a function of how the internet works of all types email scams hacking scams crypto scams whatever like it's super cheap one person can do it on their own there's basically no barriers and so really then everything we have now from from the original internet days is just that we built up you know solutions to those problems to protect people so that most of the time you don't have to really think about it and you can kind of just live your daily life and check your email and not have to generally worry about every link you click and things like that yeah especially if you're just like an average person so um so anyway that's kind of my take on the downside parts of it that yes there's tons of horrible stuff but also that's true of everything on the internet and somewhat true of humans in general and like again even in society like we built up these rules and police and all these things to like protect us from maybe the people who don't want to play nice with the other people so yeah um but yeah so in terms of the potential aspect of it and kind of our main topic i guess to me i have this example that i kind of want to walk through in this with you all right and so the you know people probably heard about like nfts to some degree the like sort of internet pictures people are selling and buying on the blockchain um basically if you've heard like board api club or these things that have been in the news and a lot of it is just like absolutely like why is somebody paying 300 000 for a monkey picture like you know and that end of it is very much just like cultural why does why do people buy a rolex why do they buy a lamborghini why do they buy any of these things like you know whether it's status or things like that is the primary reason they're buying these things because my rolex doesn't tell the time any different than yeah a 20 timex or whatever so yeah um okay so that's fine you could be into that or not into that or whatever but the utility of that is you know minimal from a like business starting perspective and those kind of things at least yeah on a surface level so um in terms of bootstrapping business i'm involved in this organization called uh third time uh in their gaming company and they've started this game which i've been involved in for the last you know four or five months and they've used this web 3 as a way to bootstrap their game and now this is a thing that also people say they're going to do a lot um is like create a game and like you know who knows if they know how to create games or whatever yeah but this case is the team that are real game developers they worked at ea the the ceo uh was the madden general manager for four or five years so like these are real game people uh some of them come from draftkings so they've got a gambling side and they've had the number one ios app uh for horse racing for horse racing for the past like four years so it's a a real team that makes real stuff they're us-based they're all you know who they are you can look them up okay so for those who don't know ian just addressed a lot of the things that are wrong in the majority of the nft projects and stuff like they promise they can't deliver they're not actually saying who they are all these things so like for those who know about all the web 3 drama he just addressed a lot of the concerns about how should we trust these people the rest of y'all you don't need to worry about it but just a note that's why he said all that right and so that part doesn't right exactly so uh you know the internet and web 3 and web 2 and all these things are are geared towards anonymity by default in a lot of cases and so the initial wave of web 3 stuff was very focused on anonymity and cryptocurrency has had a big focus on anonymity uh as one of its benefits in terms of like um you know having to do with like suppression and different things like that like uh from like countries being able to suppress you and things and not and being unbound from that so that's been that like cultural aspect of anonymity uh which again is not an area of it i'm particularly interested in like i like the benefits that governments give you and the rules and regulations and things so i don't necessarily particularly care so much about the anomaly part and so um so yeah so this is where can this technology be used by people who are having a different approach it's not just an anonymous person who you know is anywhere promising whatever but real people you can touch them and feel them there uh you know and are verifiable and so on so uh and so what they're doing is creating uh a crypto based blockchain based uh horse racing game and on the bootstrapping end of it they did bootstrap it by releasing nfts that were basically like their fundraising round uh and as you know owners of those nfts receive coins basically a special like cryptocurrency that give you different rights um some of it is that you'll share in the proceeds and the profits of the game um and you know there's other benefits too which are not really important to this but the idea being that kind of the really core idea i find most interesting is this ability to kind of raise money um in a way that the current structure doesn't allow in the legal system which is or at least not easily and so um so they were able to go out to a bunch of people stake their case raise money to get this game off the ground the game just actually went into beta yeah uh friday okay no it's a real game that exists they used the money to start the game and they built the game actually did it yeah and um and though another very interesting side effect to me of this is that so i've done some investments in companies just uh you know just startup investments angel investments they'd be called where i'm writing somewhere between a thousand dollar check and like a ten thousand dollar check and so i've probably done that 15 times okay i've literally those checks just go off i never really hear from these companies again like i mean occasionally you'll get an update email or whatever um sometimes they work out and sometimes they don't but the fundraising aspect is very separate from whatever the company's doing the company doesn't really get a lot of benefit out of the people they fundraise from other than the money which is a huge thing but they're really just getting the money and you know they might occasionally get a few connections or whatever but really you're primarily just getting the money um whereas this another interesting aspect of this is that they've created this huge community and this community is heavily involved like i built this whole website where people can do all this analytics i'm not going to get into the details of it but you can do a bunch of analytics around the game um other people have written all these in-depth analytic articles this is all before the game even launched like a huge excited community that's constantly talking about it bringing people into the fold on it so you know from someone who's uh saw bootstrap the software company i mean when i did it it's like i'm in the cave working working working you know coding code and encoding come out of the cave like and i was just like trying to get a couple people to buy and i had like really just a little software community of people who knew me and that was it like i had no real connections i had nobody out there advocating for me at all really like in terms of other people doing stuff around the business or things like that so um so that's also another really fascinating aspect to me is like this community that can form when you have such a grassroot interest of people uh you know in invested financially in it right from the beginning um and a structure that allows them to participate more versus just the structure that is kind of writing checks and then you go away um which i mean honestly there's a lot of people who want to do that too and that's that's yeah but so can can i pause you into that yeah what what structure about web so like if i would imagine two scenarios you have the exact same company and one of them is going to ask for people to give between 1000 ten thousand dollars so that they can go right traditional software and one of them is going to ask for you to buy nfts that are worth between one and ten thousand dollars so they can go write software what about the nft one makes the community happen more is it just because nfts and crypto are more exciting is it because it's in the blockchain you have access to the data so you can write software about it more like what actually makes that a more connected experience than traditional fundraising well i think that there's first of all i think that there is you could have much smaller denominations so you have more people i think than regular fundraising you're usually not able to like when you're at the one to ten thousand dollar level that's going to be from still a pretty small group of people and then as you go up it's even less people it's just like okay like the next level is like two or three vc firms each kick in larger amounts of money and that's kind of right that's it so the actual number of people involved is actually quite small um whereas this i think they sold like initially it was like 5 000. so now you have like all right even if it's not actually 5 000 people maybe it's 3 000 people so now you have 3 000 people who are invested in this as opposed to 20. um and then also i think the 20 i think you're probably looking at different types of people with different time availability like like i've been like running this business and i didn't always have a lot of time like when i wrote this thousand dollar check or five thousand dollar check like you're probably not gonna get a lot more time out of me generally speaking i mean i'd always be happy to like do a phone call and answer questions or things like that right uh generally speaking i think the people writing those kind of checks in the traditional setup are just not going to have a lot of time to give you and so i think when you can do smaller amounts because these weren't a thousand dollars initially they were probably like a hundred dollars or something like that and so yeah you know when you're at that level there's a lot more people who can be involved um and so you just have that broader community and so you have thousands of people who feel like they have an ownership interest on you know one level or another and you know those people are then engaged and uh i think there is like part of the community aspect there's a cultural aspect to how web 3 kind of is set up right now where there is more of a community focus um yeah in traditional software where nobody's really building a community pre-launching software like yeah occasionally you see it uh and i think it's a great idea but it's not doesn't actually happen very often yeah and for those who don't know one of the things web3 tends to do is when someone's coming with any kind of a project whether it's an nft drop or whatever else they'll use usually have a discord which is like a chat room and they just have a group of people who just get really excited about the thing and that might be temporal that might be something that happens at the beginning of web 3 but in five years of web 3's still around it won't happen but it is something that they can take advantage of so one of the things ian's mentioning here is that like when somebody starts a business there's no cultural expectation or idea around i'm starting a business please invest and now of course you're also going to want to join my slack or my discord we're all going to talk about it all the time whereas just inherently the way the web 3 culture works is that people want to be involved in getting updates and and that's almost not even i don't know about you but doesn't even seem to me to be anything that's inherently better or different about web3 as a technology it just happens to be a cultural difference right right yeah i would agree it's just a cultural difference and i think that there is an aspect of it it's like new and exciting is part of that cultural difference and i think um but i do think this idea of being able to participate at smaller levels is super important and something that nobody's really addressing like i think a lot of the benefits that i've already talked about and that you know everything we will talk about um really could be done in the existing systems like i think stocks could do what i'm talking about but they're not allowed to do what i'm talking about right now and so i think that that's the rub like if the laws were changed i think you could get like 95 percent of these benefits from the traditional financial system the way it is with some modifications nobody talks about doing those modifications so i don't know if that's going to happen but at first i thought there was a parallel and i realized it's not so i'm going to tell you because i was like this is a good counter and i realize it's not so i want to say that so have you ever heard of honeycomb credit uh no so honeycomb's assistant my assistant my friend danielle who if y'all listen to the podcast she's been on before she started a company making vegan cookies and at some point just recently she did a thing where she said i'm trying to raise i don't know what it was fifty thousand dollars a hundred thousand dollars she used this company called honeycomb credit but the difference is you can give as much as you want or as little as you want and she communicates with you about how it's going but the expectation of honeycomb is that there's a very strict payoff structure and so like you will be paid back within five years at this percentage unless she defaults here's what default looks like that's kind of thing so the end result of honeycomb while you can give as little or as much as you want is money back with interest not some kind of proof of an ownership stake which is what you're talking about like stocks are the only really great parallel where you own like a particular percentage of the business and that gives you a particular benefit and like you said it's so regulated you can't get anything other than very specifically named benefits from holding a stock whereas with holding an nft you can get whatever benefits they want you can be you can get extra coins in the game you can get a little gold star next to your name in the game you can get early access to the game so versus honeycomb where you can give as much as or as little as you want the only payback there is the money back with nfts similar to stocks you keep holding it but unlike stocks they can be created with more things where stocks are super limited is that kind of where you're coming at from that yeah i mean like the honeycomb things basically alone it sounds like a loan it's just right so there's no like unlimited upside the upside is capped which is uh your risk is capped your upside's capped and that all makes sense um yeah so in this photo finish for example if you're a holder of the government tokens which you get by owning the nfts then um you don't have a capped upside like if the game becomes gigantic like you're gonna receive your percentage of the profits of the game like indefinitely and so uh you know that's that's kind of the the unlimited upside which is like a stock right like if you own twenty percent of a company then that company gets huge it's only twenty percent forever and you know the unlimited upside um but it just drives that to the very early stage where like uh he never wrote me back but on twitter patio 11 had a little tweet storm about this and he was saying how like this is all silly because you could do the same thing with stocks and but i feel like for those who don't know patty 11's sort of internet famous guy friend of mine i don't know if you know matt or not but um i don't know i'm in person so i've known him forever since before i started and uh he works at stripe now and to me like stripe is the perfect example of everything that's wrong because stripe and for those who don't know stripe is this payment processing company credit card processing for the internet and it's super huge it's been a private company now for like 11 years or something like that it's it's in the old days it would have gone public many many years ago but everybody tries to avoid going public now so they're still not public and so here it's like okay well you could so his point was like you can go in and when i when the company ipos you can invest in it and that's the same thing but it's not at all the same thing because now this is the biggest company on the internet everybody loves stripe everybody would love to own a pizza stripe you literally can't nobody can just have a piece of stripe they still haven't gone public and by the time they do go public they've pushed off so much and i've had so many rounds of investment that you are not buying the upside of stripe at that point like the upside of stripe has been already clean realized yeah realized by like because this upside is coming from i i have the vision early on that they're going to do well right so so what you're saying there about the upside is basically um you know like if if you ian landsman 11 years ago saw the potential value of stripe what you wanted to be able to do was to buy in 11 years ago when nobody was sure if it was going to take off and then you get paid off because you realized it when they didn't and that's something that's not possible with stripe because you never got that chance and now by the time they were to go public if they did everybody knows it and the people who are able to benefit from that realization have been benefiting it from it privately basically is that kind of where you're going with that yeah and i mean and i have a literal example i mean i was the the person you're talking about about stripe specifically yeah i was talking about stripe forever ago i told you who knows how many people are stripe i mean i'm involved in laravel laravel has this huge stripe package that everybody uses everybody's been pushing stripe i myself have definitely generated tens of millions of dollars not just through my own account but through people i've onboarded the stripe over the many years and uh so my gain from that is nothing right like um you know how i the service is still in business so you could say like on that high level right like i help the service sure grow and stay in business so i still get to use them so that's the traditional idea is like well the early adopters they help it succeed and what they get is to keep using the service which is it's fine but i don't know if it's it's definitely not commensurate with the work they put in um it's not fair in any sort of natural you know common terminology of fairness like i put in all this work pushing your product i don't really get anything i'm still paying fee i don't even think i'm free yeah it's free to me like i'm still paying the fees i pay just like everybody else so i'm paying to use the service that i'm also pushing to lots of software developers who are then using the service and generating more fees for stripe um and i literally can't invest it it's literally impossible even now 11 years in i can't do it so i think the idea of you know i did all that for free now imagine if stripe if i'd had even the tiniest little pizza stripe like that's even potentially more that i could have been involved in things i could have done um and certainly it's more fair and so so i don't know i don't know that this i'm not even saying web3 is the best solution to this like i'm not one of those super web 3 is the answer every problem in the world um but i do think it shows us that there are problems with the current system and that whether this just becomes the way to address it or the existing system is modified to acknowledge that in the modern world and how the internet works and how people interact with the internet uh requires something different than was invented in 1560 whatever when people want to go get spices from india like this is a different world and maybe we need to make some tweaks here to how this works and you know things like that i mean just on a somewhat tangent on the current financial system because i think it's ridiculous how when i have done these angel investments like they usually use the services that allow you to do it and to do it you have to be a qualified investor which means you have to make i think it used to be over 200 000 a year and now it might be like 300 000 a year but like you literally can't do this if you don't already have a lot of money and so again like okay like you're trying to protect people at the same time like i can go buy any random stock i can go buy penny stocks i can go buy all kinds of stuff i can go buy that's going to be a horrible financial investment potentially and but certainly i could buy very risky investments and nobody's there to like say well how did you make over 300 thousand dollars a year yeah and guard me like that so you know i don't really get that whole thing it seems like very counter to uh sort of the american model in general and just again it's not sure what you're protecting people from there um since they can go out and make bad investments and all kinds of things whatever they want so i don't know why like this startup you really believe in and think is amazing i don't know why you can't you shouldn't be allowed to invest in that um unless you make more than 300 thousand dollars but yeah those are the rules so yeah and it's interesting because a lot of the criticisms that i think um i really want to dig into not in this podcast but in general of of uh crypto are the ways real people especially real people who have not traditionally been a give given access to like financial options have gotten excited about the financial options that they have with web3 gone in and then gotten burned by scammers or by you know solana dropping from 180 to 40 you know dollars within the span of a month or two or whatever and so a lot of people say like that's an evidence that not not only is it not democratizing kind of access to finance in the way that people are pitching but it's actually hurting the people who had the least access to the old systems because they're like finally a place i can invest and then they get scammed which is it go ahead no no i i was going to respond but i'd rather hear your response so okay well my response is just that i don't really see that as any different than most anything else in terms of investing in finance and i think because at the same time you've had this whole thing with web3 the past year you've had the exact same thing in the stock market and robin hood and gamestop and uh amc movie theaters and all these stocks that went up on airbnb and moderna and all these same things were like i bought modi and i have 400 and now it's worth 100 or whatever like yeah it's literally the same thing and so i think that again that was something that used to be had a gatekeeper right like you couldn't even buy stock without like a broker you couldn't you didn't have a broker unless you had a fair amount of money right and so as it's now come down and down down then okay you got e-trade but still there was like fees and it seemed complicated and clunky and like you still had to kind of like learn about it and be invested in it mentally to like figure it out and now it's like well i just downloaded robin hood from the app store and there's no fees and there's no nothing and i just like throw my money in my money super easy and it's like a game and so i don't know like that there's like i think it's more of a bigger issue like a financial literacy issue and i think it's just bigger than like oh it's crypto or oh it's you know a stock or whatever like it happens in a lot of areas now and i think there's just a lot of volatility around all that and i don't i don't know how it's going to work out but i do think it's like broader than just yeah crypto and that was that was actually my exact same response was that i've seen similarly i've seen people who previously didn't have access to investing get robinhood go all in on somebody else's advice and then lose half of their life savings within the last year right so that doesn't mean that's a good thing um but it also means this is not a uniquely web3 thing we are in places where people who have the ease of investment with no government protection are able to put a whole bunch of money in and lose a whole bunch of money um and that exists in all the systems now there's some systems that have some things in place like you said the certified investor thing but there's plenty of places for someone to put a bunch of money into something with promise and for it not to pan out so like investment at its core requires you to have faith that something's gonna work out and take on the risk that it might not and if it doesn't work out lose a crap ton of money right like web 3 is one of them and the cryptocurrencies are one of them now that doesn't mean there's not more regulation in traditional financial systems and more you know more potential for scams and a new system that is not as well regulated totally sure but it's not as if i think one of the things i i would respond against here is that a lot of people have looked had this very um not t-totaling but whatever like if you have anything positive to say about web3 you support everything about web3 and if you have negative things to say so like the moment i said hey i'm diving into a little bit of web-three stuff last fall i got added to a whole bunch of lists of the sheep the idiots who think these things are good and then the moment i said anything negative about web3 last week instantly i got a whole bunch of people who followed me because they're like and then i go to their bio and they're like anti-crypto people and i'm like hold up you know like i'm not an anti-web three person i'm not a pro web 3 person i'm just a human being who looks at the good and the bad of every system so one of those things like the ultimate i mean this is just how everything has become right like yes politics politics like every i have lots of like if you just look at my twitter profile you would think i'm the farthest left person you've ever met like i'm out there i'm totally extremist and then like but in reality i'm actually have like lots of more conservative views on different topics and i'm definitely middle of the road in a lot of topics and so uh but the twitter's nature i think to some degree i think like the extreme political climate of certain individuals in politics during the last few years like maybe uh where people only share certain kinds of views and not others so like i do think this like all falls i don't know who knows how it's gonna all shake out it doesn't seem like it's sustainable uh yeah hopefully not the collapse of society right fingers crossed but um it does seem like something's got to shake out there but i think it's yeah it's it's like again bigger than just tech right it's like yeah but it's great um right now so but yeah no i think i'm definitely not one of those people i'm not i'm not like you know like there's a person i know you know who's like you're gonna buy your house on the blockchain and like like i don't know like there's all this other stuff that's like involved in buying a house it's not just like making the money like the moving the money is a part of it but there's like all this other stuff involved i don't know if i could do it with the blockchain like so you know there's there's a lot there's like those people out there i'm definitely not one of those people but i do think it's a tool yeah that for a moment in time if you are a person or company with good intentions with a real idea that is is potentially an interesting path verse what has traditionally been possible uh whether it's going to a vc whether it's and you know we're going to be in a phase here where i think some of those things are going to tighten up a little bit like literally anybody could go to a vc in the past like five years and just get rid of check essentially like i mean there's just been so much money in the system um you know presumably that might tighten up a little bit so which is how when i started my company it was like 2003 2004 and so it was like right after the dot-com bubble nobody was going gonna give me money for anything yeah at all for sure and so um so it's like okay well how do i do this with like out any money and that was kind of impetus and i could see that happening again i don't know if it'll be as extreme as that was or whatever but like you could have scenarios like okay i have a great idea how can i you know get the money to do the idea how can i build up a community to help me uh you know grow the idea so i just think it's an interesting thing where i don't want to personally be like totally out of it like i want to be in it enough to know what's going on and then we'll see what happens like i totally all the time all this could go zero it could all be nothing totally possible but i also think it's possible that's not true and so i don't want to be like in five years like oh i totally just missed this thing it's useless and oh wow actually it wasn't totally useless and yeah now i'm five years behind so yeah that's kind of my thinking on it yeah and one of my one of the people who responded to my tweet um when i was kind of criticizing web3 we went back and forth a little bit it was a very positive interaction in the end it was just sort of agree to disagree but he tags some twitter bot that says remind me in three years i guess that's the name of the twitter bot or whatever so he's just basically like well we'll see which of us are right in three years and obviously there's like a little bit of like a snark of like i know i'm gonna be right in his mind but i was like yeah very curious to see you know um and i think a lot of people like read my criticism to say it will flop in three years i was like no i don't i don't know what's going to happen in the future and honestly in some ways i'm happy to understand the universe of it a lot better than i did before um because if i decided to dip back in i know exactly where i'd go however i've also decided that like it's not the thing for me right now you know and that's my own individual personal decision to make so um the area of what was going on six months ago like when you got involved like that part doesn't really interest me anymore either it's like you evolve and you see like okay what can i use these part different things for or not and what's interesting what's not and so my evolution has definitely been more in this like people doing interesting projects real teams doing real things like those are where my focus is and they're like very much limited down because i understand the technology now i get more about what's possible and we'll see and i think one of the things that came up in your thread the other day too i think is the idea of like where like three years to me totally not enough to like i think to probably claim rightness i mean well who knows but i think it could be earlier than that and it might be 15 years until you see like the real like oh this is where it all clicks and maybe there's no technology bits that have to happen and regulation and whatever there's a few whatever the things that are going to fall into place where you really have the like connection um or yeah maybe that won't happen right yeah and like you said the one of the benefits of the the life you're living is that you're in a place where you can dip into this and this might be the decision that look you look back and say wow i'm so glad i did that because look at where user escape is 15 years from now and how it was changed and able to thrive because these decisions are made and you might look back at it 15 years ago and you'll say i remember that little blip where i did web 3 stuff a little bit exactly you know and like either way you're you're good so yeah because it's still running every day right so hopefully it won't matter and uh yeah for me personally and then um yeah and i would could totally see either outcome like i would not be shocked by by either outcome um yeah right now it's just like too early you know there's so much technology obviously everybody can have all the examples of here's these technologies which we were sure were going to be hits and then they weren't and here's these technologies we were sure are going to be hits and they were and there was a technology nobody thought anything about and then it was super important like you know there's who knows you just don't know right yeah you just don't know you don't know the future yeah right exactly so uh anything's possible um but yeah i just think to me it's something to keep an eye on and also is opening up maybe at the very least some interesting conversations about the way the current system works and what's fair and what's not and where should we people be protected or not and like all those different kind of things um i do think that that's out there and you've already even seen that out there in other ways like crowdfunding and things like that which are trying to like make the existing system sort sorta kind of work in some way for the same type of goals so yeah um yeah we didn't mention that earlier but of course when i thought of honeycomb credit the first thing i thought it was crowdfunding so there you know there's definitely some parallels there but again crowdfunding seems to tend to be much more around an initial kind of like benefit versus an ongoing owner just kind of so kick some money in and and that's sort of it um yeah and you do feel really connected right like you're getting all these updates maybe not maybe not as not as much of a two-way street but you at least are like invested thinking about it maybe getting feedback at times but again usually with crowdfunding then there's there's a payoff at some point you get your payoff which is the thing ships to you whatever and then that's it versus this which is like no there's like an ongoing you know involvement investment and also potential profit from it so it's sort of like a combination of stocks and kickstarter maybe in terms of like how plus plus a whole new set of things and there are crowdfunding platforms and tools that let you invest as a stock owner but usually it's like okay you're aggregated into a like a fund and it's really the fun that's investing and you own part of the fund and you know there's fees all the way in between all those things so now you're like multiple steps removed and everybody gets their piece in those steps along the way so how much is your like 500 is really you know right in there it's kind of not that much by the time everybody takes their cut in the middle so uh yeah so some of that stuff i think i think a lot of that stuff has the veneer of respectability and uh protection that isn't actually true that's kind of another it's like the stocks with robin hood like well it's the stock market and like it's safe yeah like i think that that a lot of that stuff is the same exact way where it's like well here's this here's angel list and we'll take care of everything and it'll all be fine and like just you know you can use it and it's all safe but and it's like safe in that it's probably not going to be just like straight up stolen but like right it's not like that's pretty much like they could still fly right that's like yeah like this could be any random person with any random idea just raising some money you have no idea what happens to the money like it's of i mean i've never really been explained when i've done those type of ones where like who's responsible for anything is the fund organizer do they know the founders it could be its own scam right there of like you know there's all kinds of stuff that to me is shady and all that potentially so um i've only done those type really when i've known the person uh and they're just using this that's like the vehicle they want to use because it's easier legally to do it um but yeah so i think that if you just like go on angel list and look through there i mean i wouldn't be surprised if 20 30 40 of them are like not the realest of companies oh yeah i got it they're they're sort of real but like yeah is this person just gonna bail who knows what happens to the money there's no like feedback mechanisms to the person who put in 500 bucks it's like one day they're just saying they're out of business and you just get a thing that's something that we spent all our money sorry it didn't work out and see you exactly who knows if they paid themselves all the money you know that's it's all yeah that's all those kind of stuff like yeah that's a good point um we're running late but i wanted to make sure you had a chance to cover everything you wanted to cover so is there anything before i get to you know like the last question is there check the other aspect of this that you wanted to make sure we got to today um no i think we hit like the core stuff but i think that's okay i think that's a good place to leave it intro otherwise you have to go down deeper and i don't know right it's gonna it's gonna be too long yes i was gonna say i have plenty of questions to ask you but they're not gonna keep us under an hour so okay so the last question of today is what insight or support did you either receive or need when you were younger that you hope more people will give to others um definitely the big turning point in my career was i had kind of two things which was um i went to college for accounting and i didn't really want to be an accountant um

2022-06-20 18:21

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